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METRO VANCOUVER -- Municipalities are diverting more food scraps from landfills to composting facilities, but for some Metro residents, especially in Richmond, the smell of success is anything but sweet.

Metro Vancouver is grappling with “dramatically more” odour-related complaints this year compared with previous years, said Ray Robb, Metro’s manager of environmental regulation and enforcement.

“It’s really quite a nauseating smell,” said Richmond resident Angela Burnett, who described the odour as rotting vegetables with the “acrid undertone of chemicals.”

The smell isn’t constant but occurs several times a week, said Burnett, who lives in south Richmond.

“It really is a horrible smell.... It seems to be very strong in some parts of Richmond, and then on another day strong in another part. And I think it must be due to the wind.”

Metro, which is responsible for air quality in the region, has traced 103 of the 245 complaints received this year to Richmond-based Harvest Power, which turns organic material including kitchen waste into compost, soil and even electricity.

The facility near No. 7 Road and Blundell, also known as Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre, has been receiving increasing amounts of food waste over the last two years as more and more municipalities added food scraps to their yard trimmings collection programs in an effort to divert them from the landfill.

Most Metro municipalities, including the city of Surrey, send their organic waste to the facility.

“It smells like composting food scraps,” Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie said of the odour. “It’s certainly not constant, but it is periodic and quite noticeable.”

The uptick in odour-related complaints — which have also come from residents of Burnaby, New Westminster and Vancouver — is likely related to changes in both the quantity and composition of waste processed at the facility, said Metro Vancouver’s Robb.

Food waste, especially when it contains animal proteins, is much smellier to compost than yard waste because it contains more nitrogen, he said.

Smells can be minimized by ensuring that enough oxygen moves through the material and that there is an optimal balance of wetter, denser food waste and lighter, drier yard waste, as anyone who owns a backyard composter can attest, Robb said.

Metro is working with the company to step up such preventive measures, he said, as well as to improve the efficiency of the process through which foul-smelling gases are collected.

“If you increase your productivity and increase the quantity of smelly stuff going in there, you can overload your biofilter, so we want to make sure that their biofilters are achieving the kind of removal efficiency that they should,” Robb said, adding that Metro suspects the devices designed to eliminate the smells may be overwhelmed. “We smell odours coming off the biofilters that we shouldn’t.

“With these types of air contaminants, they are not generally a health threat,” he added. “It’s just that they smell.”

Odours will be significantly reduced with the opening of an “anaerobic digestion facility” in the coming months, which will divert some of the smelliest material into an indoor, closed-air system, Jeff Leech, regional vice-president of Harvest Power, said in a statement.

The facility, known as the “Energy Garden,” will use anaerobic digestion technology to turn 30,000 tonnes of organic waste into enough energy to power more than 900 Metro Vancouver homes each year, according to the company’s website. It is already operational, but will not reach full capacity until the spring.

The company is also increasing and upgrading the facility’s biofilter capacity to contain odours, introducing a facility-wide emission audit program and installing new odour control technology, Leech said.

In the meantime, Metro Vancouver is considering a new bylaw to crack down on operations that produce foul odours, Robb said.

“What we’re mostly doing is saying that if you discharge odorous substances, you will pay based upon your impact on people.”

Odours can be measured by how much they need to be diluted in order for people not to smell them and impact determined by how many people live in a given area, Robb explained. Companies that produce foul odours in uninhabited areas would not be charged anything, he added.

Brodie, who has heard from many residents concerned about the smell, emphasized that the facility is an important part of Metro’s strategy to ban organic waste from municipal garbage by 2015.

“It’s important that we deal with the organics,” he said. “Unfortunately we have this other problem to deal with, but the people at ... (Harvest Power) want to alleviate the problem as well,” he said.

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